|
||
|
Joe -
I'm reading the paper tonight and will post my thoughts... but the preliminaries/abstract are interesting.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
i actually just had this talk with a friend after sitting him down to watch oldboy. i think it has tremendous replay value, but it is a little tough at times.
requiem for a dream.
Movies and Film - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
Zenmonk-
the collapse of the wavefunction applies to -any- quantum system with observable characteristics. the "collapse" simply refers to the mathematical impurity that exists due to the fact that the wavefunction, once descriptive, has now changed to a dirac delta function at the value that you observe.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
and zenmonk, where is this region of perpendicularity that you are pointing to?
Astronomical - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
so, having looked up some of the relevant mars atmospheric parameters,and examined the phase diagram for water, it is clear that if this is liquid water, it is bound to be a very, very, very rare occurrence indeed. however, its existence is not precluded outright.
the atmospheric pressure on mars ranges from 6-10mbar (contrast with 1013mbar on earth). at 6mbar, there is no stable liquid phase of water - sublimation is the only permitted phase transition. on the other hand, at 10mbar, there is a temperature range of 5K, 10K on the outside, at which liquid water is stable. the conditions would have to be utterly perfect, but it is not unrealistic - on a warm day, the temperatures do approach or exceed the band in which liquid water is stable.
Astronomical - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
ati-
it seems to me that given the highly delicate nature of any water micro-environment, any wind at all would destroy it. i would imagine it as something like having acetone on a piece of aluminum...
it's hard to say, but most plausible in my mind is a liquid substance other than water, although water is certainly not impossible.
the apparent translucence is also disturbing if it is a solid.
Astronomical - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
ati-
what makes you think that neurons can be coerced into behaving like very, very fast transistors at all?
Cutting Edge Computer Hardware - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
whatever it is, it appears at first glance to be a liquid due to its clear refractory properties... the appearance of solid terrain 'underneath' the surface of some of the water, as well as what appears to be an inundated region on the left side of the photograph lend credence to the notion that this may very well be a substance in the liquid phase. this is entirely possible for a heavy substance with a very low vapor pressure... perhaps a long chained hydrocarbon of some kind?
i do wish that biologists would think outside the goddamned box when it comes to life... why is water so necessary?
Astronomical - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
certainly i agree that heuristically the natural line of reasoning is to start looking for carbon-based, water supported life.
however, i would also point out that all life that we know of has been found on earth. a simple evolutionary argument should suffice to show that basing our search for life on the native species of a planet full of creatures adapted specifically to that planet is bound to wrap us up in errors, eventually. appeal to the drake equation, if you wish, to convince yourself of this.
as to the photograph itself, the presence of the 'ripples' actually concerns me somewhat. if, as the article indicates, all of the edges of the 'puddles' were of equal altitude, what would cause the formation of ripples on the surface? on earth, ripples are formed through perturbations of the surface of the fluid, either by flow over features below the surface, or by driving forces above it. in an atmosphereless and zero-flow (if all altitudes are equal) environment, how did the ripples form?
Astronomical - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
see, i disagree with the commercialization of art in the first place. the reason i dislike DRM so much is that i feel very strongly conflicted about the notion of a corporation trying to squeeze every last dollar out of a musician's (and this term is often used loosely) work.
the record companies are not doing so badly that they need to protect themselves. they are in firm control of a multibillion dollar a year industry that will never go away. the day when one person buys an album and distributes it to the entire internet simply will never come.
i think that media content providers need to sack up and recognize that they now exist in the digital era. this does not mean protectionism, it simply means that a paradigm shift is in order that will effectively and meaningfully reflect what it means.
Politics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
yeah, we need reform in campaign contributions & earmarks. it's just too easy for these fucks to get away with being dirty.
Politics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
eh, not exactly elegant.
there shouldn't be a case where you don't know how to differentiate the function f. besides, some functions don't even have an inverse... you're better off just learning to differentiate arbitrary functions.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
ati-
what you're describing is the principle behind FM/AM. your radio receiver in your car, for example, does not receive a single signal - it receives two.
the carrier frequency is what you 'tune' your radio to, and the modulation frequency is a second signal that is used to produce what you actually hear on the radio.
you add the modulation signal to the carrier, send it out, and then subtract the carrier again to retrieve (demodulate) the signal.
for the record, the simplest 'device' that you are describing is called a frequency mixer. it accomplishes addition, subtraction, and even multiplication quite faithfully.
Computer Networking - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
You could always use the Tor network (tor.eff.org i believe). Safe, secure, and only a small hit in terms of speed.
Google - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
haha...
while we're correcting people, there is no uranium in a "thermonuclear" reactor. only in a thermonuclear weapon.
thermonuclear is traditionally used to refer to a device that operates on the principle of fusion as opposed to fission. a thermonuclear weapon generates most of its destructive power by a hydrogen reaction that is driven by the explosive force of a smaller fission (typically uranium) reaction.
that aside, i think you're absolutely right bryan, the problem here is loopholes (read: lobbyists), who convince lawmakers that the interests that they should be representing are corporate interests, not those of the people of the united states.
this is why when the idea of raising taxes is brought up, we inevitably hear about the "impact to competition" and the "chilling effect on entrepreneurship", as opposed to "universal health care" and "schools that teach children".
Politics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
well the notation dy/dx refers to the derivative of the function y with respect to x, so in that context dx/dy doesn't really mean anything, since x is a variable. on the other hand if you can isolate x in terms of y, then dx/dy would have meaning. but they are not really referring to the same thing.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
I/O?
Cutting Edge Computer Hardware - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
Taxing the super-rich barely makes a dent in the deficit; the middle-class holds the vast majority of the money.
Wrong. The middle class represents approximately 25% of yearly income as reported by the US census bureau. 33% comes from the top 5% income bracket. Check your facts, dude.
I think that punishing people for being financially successful is absurd.
How is it a punishment? Taxes are the ante for the game of society. It is how we buoy up our social programs, pay for defense, etc etc. Regardless of how you feel about where the money is going, the point is that paying taxes is how you earn your right to participate in a civil society.
You'll hear it from everybody ever, that America is the land of opportunity, and that's why people make so much. Well, if that's the case, maybe they kick in a little bit extra to fund the country that got them rich in the first place?
Many of the super rich don't even PAY taxes, which is another can of worms altogether. There is a substantial contingency of folks who spend quite a bit of time making sure that they report zero income on their taxes, and who are worth (m/b)illions.
Of course, once in power, it will suddenly become clear that it is necessary to raise taxes on the middle class as well, in order to generate the necessary revenue. Mark my words.
I currently pay approximately 25% of my income directly into taxes - that's roughly 10,000$US a year. If taxes were raised on the middle class, which I am firmly a member of, from, say, 25% to 30%, I would instead kick in 11,520$USD a year.
On the other hand, if I made 25,000,000 dollars a year, and I was taxed 30% instead of 25%, I would kick in an additional 1.25$MUSD a year. At my salary, that means the 5% raise for one super rich person would pay for my increase right around 110 times over.
Hell, let's consider the top 5% of the population. They make at least 150$kUSD yearly, but let's assume that they all make 150$k. Let's raise their taxes from 25% to 30% and see what the revenue increase is. The median yearly income of the US is 46,326$, which is roughly equal to the yearly 30% tax burden of an earner at 150k. The increase from 25% to 30%, at 150k, is 7500$. The increase from 25% to 30% at 46,326$ is roughly 2,316$.
So the increase in 5% for a single one of the top 5% of earners covers the increase for three middle-of-the-road families. Consider the fact that many of the top 5% earn much more than 150k, and the argument becomes even more convincing.
Politics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 4 |
|
chateau ste. michelle makes a pretty solid wine all around, especially their pinot noir, and it's cheap.
if i had to pick a favorite i would have to say a good cotes du rhone.
Food - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i find the reflectors on the moon to be a pretty good indicator that the landing was real... small convex mirrors were placed on the surface by astronauts, and they are still visible. that one is pretty hard to fake.
Photography - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
laser driven cruise control. toyota stole it from me.
Geeks - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
nadeem-
it's a nasty one for sure. the problem is that nobody knows what happens in the slit region, and it really depends on your interpretation of the 'philosophy' of quantum mechanics. the most widely accepted view, which is called the copenhagen interpretation, is that the photons passing through the double slits have no position until we measure it. does that mean they go through both slits? neither slit? that is ultimately up to how you wish to interpret the results, as it cannot be known. after all, if you try to measure it, you destroy the state of the photons and you lose all relevant information. it's a catch 22.
anyways, about free will. free will is an emergent property - a single neuron, for example, does not have 'free will'. its processes are deterministic and rely primarily on chemical gradients as their impetus. however if you get 8 pounds of neurons together, voila, they have what we call 'free will'. it's a bit like magnetism. individual iron atoms are not magnetic. a bar of iron, on the other hand, can be easily coerced into being so.
in short, saying that free will can be the consequence of an evolutionary procedure directly implies evolution on the organismal level. the brain would have to collectively evolve to develop something like free will, as individual neurons are incapable of experiencing it.
furthermore, we do not always have free will, do we? jumping when frightened, getting the hiccups, and other involuntary processes are evidently 'too important' for us to control.
i would venture that free will is actually a consequence of the organizational properties of our brains, rather than their biological foundation. synaptic plasticity encourages and fosters communication and cohesion between neurons which are closely/frequently associated. when we see an object we can smell, touch, taste, kick, etc etc it. perhaps the 'free will' that we experience is just a conscious manifestation of making the choice of which pathway a stimulus should go down.
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
redstar-
you say that novels are being "shoved down your throat" as though you have no choice in accepting what is in the book. if you're at a school that's worth a damn, the point is to read it and be critical about it, not read it and accept what it says verbatim with added teacher's analysis. that's what's called "thinking", a notion to which you made reference in your posts.
Books/Reading - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
has anybody seen 'the corporation'?
Evil - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
it surprises me that nobody has defined murder. the closest is the first post, where the question is asked if it is immoral to 'kill humans'. i would say, personally, that this is ambiguous.
death is not immoral, nor is it moral. it is simply a part of life. that being said, i find the view that murder is socially irrelevant because death is immoral immensely repugnant. yue has raised this point a number of times without ever adequately defending or justifying it.
the point of being opposed to murder is not some sort of maniacal standoff with death, it has to do with creating and upholding a society that is worth being a part of and defending. the point is to draw lines in the moral sand, and declare complete moral repugnance unacceptable. the punishment for murder is simply the logical extension of punishing people for rape, theft, or fraud. we lay no claim to moral control, simply moral expectations.
killing another human is often immoral, but occasionally can be moral, or at least morally intractable. i do not think it would be immoral to kill hitler. i do not think it would be immoral to shoot somebody with menacing intent who was coming up my stairs in my home towards my family. i do think it would be immoral to randomly kill somebody, or kill somebody for some gain.
i think this notion of moral relativity is intimately tied to the death penalty. the right to life is conditional as far as i am concerned. i think that the de facto social contract states that you have the right to live and be left alone as long as you behave that way towards others. serious infringements of this social contract, such as mass murder or murder with sociopathic intent, are a clear demonstration of an individual's inability to play nice, and in some cases i do believe that the proper thing to do is execute them. anybody who can make a convincing case for keeping people alive like jeffery dahmer or charles manson, i would be interested to hear the construction.
i think ultimately i must agree with zenmonk's conclusion that absolute evil is causing detriment or pain to no benefit, although i would amend it to no 'clear social' benefit. and i think that absolute evil should be absolutely intolerated.
Evil - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
viczy-
that is a very strange fact indeed that you have stumbled upon... i will have to play around with this some more.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
what zenmonk is getting at is the use of the word 'always' when using a logical argument.
the problem with this is that i can prove absolutely anything using logic... proving that circular logic 'works' is no less impressive than me proving that i am the almighty thunder god of the universe, which i can prove in no more than three (3) easy steps.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
what do you mean americans exactly?
Atheism - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
bill hicks was definitely a great comedian, i think one of the greatest of all time.
i just heard a new one, although he's apparently not new by most people's standards, patton oswalt... check out this clip:
http://a.wholelottanothing.org/2007/05/02/patton-oswalts-dukes-of-hazzard/
eddie izzard is a classic case as well.
Comedy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
let me first say that i think the evidence for global warming is overwhelming, and beyond dispute. it is happening, and any scientist who disagrees with that statement, given the available data, should be ashamed of themselves.
ultimately i'm not sure if it matters if we are responsible or not, although it is fairly difficult to believe that we are not somehow culpable. the point is that if we believe at all that elevated co2 levels are responsible for warming the earth and potentially causing catastrophic and irreversible climate change, it is our social duty to attempt to obviate this risk.
the trouble is that while a dollar remains to be made, somebody will try to make it. therefore, as long as petroleum exists, it will be extracted and exploited for as long as it is economically viable. there will never be zero demand for oil, simply because it is such a ubiquitous substance.
like it or not, developing countries need an energy source that does not require a highly developed infrastructure, which most renewables definitely do.
furthermore, since the invention of the fractionating column, we have derived more products from petroleum than perhaps any other raw substance we have ever come across. perhaps some of it can be done synthetically at this point, but in general any plastic product is a petroleum derivative.
oil is a good thing. burning it is not. but oil is far too profitable a substance to fool ourselves into thinking that it will simply disappear as long as we all start eating tofu tomorrow.
what needs to, has to happen, is a real and true emphasis on generating power through alternate means. there should be tax credits for power companies that build renewable stations, and by passing the savings on to the end user, a suitably high level of demand can be created.
like i said, where there is a dollar to be made, somebody will try to make it. the market got us into this problem, but i think that the market can also get us out.
Global Stuff - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
ati-
i think this is an interesting idea, but i can see a couple of problems with it. not damning, just something to think about.
first of all, there is the issue of memories that gets brought up, but i'm not totally sure it's actually an issue. if you can emulate the response of the neurons to stimulation, in theory, you have encapsulated the memories in the brain already. after all, our memories are probably just a set of relationships that is set off by a specific stimulus. therefore, if you have the response to stimulus recorded, you should get the memories as well.
but the issue that i do think is problematic is that of plasticity. the brain is not static. connections are made and broken all of the time, and that constant rearrangement is every bit as important as the existence of the neurons themselves. you would need your computer to be able to decide when to make and break connections. i suppose this could be done through image analysis, to decide a connection should be made whenever two adjacent neurons fired within some certain amount of time. then again, some neurons never fire, they simply respond by tweaking the level of a certain neurotransmitter, or do nothing at all.
i think it's complex, but i don't think it's unattainable. the brain is really just a primitive computing apparatus, really constructed for the purpose of evaluating decision trees. given enough time, i can't imagine we couldn't replicate it.
Cognitive Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
well people got along just fine for quite some time without a meaning for 'two minus two'. in fact, to the best of my recollection, zero wasn't defined until it was required to solve polynomials by arab mathematicians.
semantically speaking, no, something is not nothing, because they are defined as opposites. and mathematically speaking, a 'complete' set contains the null set but is not equal to it. and physically speaking, 'nothing' is an incomplete concept at best. there is never nothing - there is no absolute zero, there is no pure vacuum.
zero is a bit fishy, and giving it physical meaning is tricky at best. perhaps it would best remained defined in the good old days, as that quantity that you get when you square two and subtract four.
Random Stuff - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
yeah, i definitely wasn't looking for anything published, i was poking around on the pre-print servers.
i'm not sure if you're familiar with them, but they are amazing. basically it's just a way to speed up the communication of new information... instead of waiting for a journal to publish the work, you both submit it to a journal and stick it on pre-print, which lets anybody read it for free. www.arxiv.org is probably the most well-known.
ultimately i agree, the guy is probably a nut job. but i can't get past my curiosity to know exactly what number or expression is so convincing of god's existence. maybe i'll email the guy.
Atheism - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
i looked around but i can't seem to find a paper.
actually,it's worth noting that einstein remained convinced throughout his life that there was an 'equation for god'. in fact, he included a god parameter in a number of his attempts to describe the universe.
i'm not saying he's right, i'm just saying he's not the first, and they aren't all morons.
Atheism - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
yue, dual booting is actually much easier than you might think... which two os'es did you want to do it with?
Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
yep, depends on what field you're in. for joe and i, it's a bit of a long haul... i have heard of condensed matter doctorates taking 12 years.
Grad students - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i'm also a new grad student, at the university of washington. i'll most likely be studying atomic, molecular, and optical physics... should be done before 2015.
Grad students - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
my first, last, and only distro has been gentoo, for about 3 years now.
and i only had to re-format & re-install about 15 times before i got a clue...
Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
http://einstein.stanford.edu/
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
biglew-
if you would like, i can get the evidence and post it. it's pretty easy to come by. and no, it is not "dumb" to collect evidence from the past, it is possible and is done every day. try to keep in mind that the continent of antarctica does not thaw and re-freeze every year... yet.
you are wrong about digging down to see how much water there is, *that*, unlike ice cores, are dynamic variables and change all the time. for example, what if there's an earthquake?
and that's fine if you want to redefine color, who gives a shit. in fact, a lot of people do this every day - they are called "colorblind". there is likely to be a great deal of variation in terms of receptor efficiency, etc etc. but no matter who does the measuring, on what day, at what time, a spectrophotometer will show the color "blue" as a specific wavelength, and never any other (disregarding relativistic effects). that, my friend, is science.
Atheism - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
an eigenstate is a operator algebra analog to the eigenvector in linear algebra. an eigenvector is this. given a matrix
, an vector
is an eigenvector for
if:
with A a constant.
for an operator O, a function x is an eigenfunction of O if:
again with A constant.
so, for quantum mechanics, a state
is an eigenstate of the operator
if:
with A a constant.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
ok at first i was trying to ignore this thread, but it's getting a little ridiculous.
biglew, with all due respect, it's clear to me that you have not seen the data, nor do you understand the techniques.
first of all, the correlation between CO2 levels and heat trapping is fact. this can easily be derived from first principles based on reflection and transmission of light, and if you couple it with the absorption spectrum of CO2 it only gets more damning.
second, the ice method is by far the most accurate and available method that we have. please do not presume that you somehow know more than the people who have worked on perfecting these techniques for several decades. the point of the technique is that the ratio of dissolved substances in the ice is a function of temperature, plain and simple. from that, one can look back as far as you would like. the data has been analyzed and is capable of providing temperatures back to several hundred thousand years ago.
thirdly, if you examine the data for global mean temperatures vs. atmospheric CO2 concentration, there is a very suspicious rise in the temperature at exactly the point in time when the industrial revolution began and CO2 levels began to rise. interestingly enough, if you compare current CO2 levels to historic maximums, you find that there has literally NEVER been a higher atmospheric CO2 concentration than the present time. this suggest strongly that something is anomalous about our present time period as pertains to CO2 levels.
the media does not blow things out of proportion on this one, actually. simulations and measurements indicate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the effects of a global mean temperature rise of the magnitude that is predicted would be catastrophic in impact. there is literally no scientific dissent on this issue - no climate scientist has come out and said, in a peer reviewed article, that the evidence does not point in this direction.
i used to think that the evidence was too young, the theory too bold, and the data too ambiguous. then i actually looked, i read the papers, and i considered the evidence. it is overwhelming. on this issue in particular, it is frankly simply uninformed to say that it can't be happening. it can, and it is.
Atheism - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
Nadeem-
I absolutely know what you mean when you say that's physics and not mathematics, but I have a personal conviction that mathematics does, on some level, have a natural basis. physics is, as you mentioned, mathematics with constraints.
i like to say that mathematics is the language of nature, and physics is the grammar.
Atheism - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
joe has basically nailed it on this one... think of it this way. for the moment, assume it is possible to repeatedly measure a quantum state without disturbing it. if you measure a function, say psi(x) as joe has mentioned, at any time, you will get what appears to be a dirac delta at some position x. but if you could repeat this measurement infinitely, you would eventually see a dirac delta for each measurement that converges on the wavefunction itself. in practice, this is impossible, but keep in mind that the dirac delta function form of the wavefunction is an artifact created by measurement.
so what were you talking about before with eigenfunctions? i am still not clear on what your question is, but i'll be glad to help once i understand.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
ati has said what i would say, essentially. scientific truth is about as far from dogma as you can get.
Atheism - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
actually, there is a proof that 1+1=2. and if you truly believe that mathematics is a man-made construct, i urge you to take a look around. if you can locate one object, even one, in your home or apartment or whatever, that doesn't use mathematics, in its design, implementation, or intention, you will be that much closer to proving your case.
give up yet?
the thing about mathematics is that it works. it actually does describe what we see, and how things work. keep in mind that if we come up with some mathematical principle or theorem that is inconsistent with observation or existing theory, somebody is wrong. period.
Atheism - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
ati-
the problem is that "truth" is not attainable. given the circumstances, you have to guess. so if it's a guessing game, then the best possible outcome is the one where your happiness is maximized. so would you be happier in heaven or hell?
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
sounds like a load of shite to me.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
Well, considering that it's Pascal, my guess is that he is referring to the christian formula for god. But reading through the actual argument, he makes no mention of that, so I think it's fair to say that this applies to any god which rewards piety and observance.
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
as far as i'm concerned, until the theories can be unified, we don't know much about how things really work... we just have a series of approximations.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
what do you mean by the position or momentum eigenstates? position and momentum are operators, not states...
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
of course the approximations are useful, i wouldn't be typing on a computer if they weren't useful. but that doesn't mean that we know everything. if our theories were truly correct, they would intersect, just as the natural universe intersects. there are problems and contradictions in every branch of physics, without exception. that's not to discredit physics or physicists, i am one, but the fact remains that we approximate constantly, and our rules are no exception.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
just to throw it out there, my RAID array is currently 3x400GB SATA drives, and hopefully expanding to 4 soon. then there's an 80 and a 40 in my computer that i use as a holding area before things get put on the array.
Pirates - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
so i think we have plenty of interest in teaching, but HOW do we teach is the question.
i propose writing and posting 'lecture notes', perhaps on a site within shuzak, or maybe on the teacher's profile, and having threads to discuss, ask questions, and supplement the notes. it almost begs for moderator-type privileges though, so that you can prevent the discussion from going awry or changing topics altogether. thoughts?
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
first define what you mean by "something", "prove", and "exists". then i will try.
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
it's puff puff pass, of course.
Drugs - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
well i'm playing devil's advocate, so i won't mind if you join me. i think it's a fair question, given that either god exists or he does not exist, and presuming judgement based on your piety, why do anything but believe and practice?
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
p0ss, that's not a bad idea, i like the chat room idea. what would be really sweet is inline latex rendering for the room. do you know if is that possible?
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
uh, yes, protons are approximately 2000 times more massive than an electron.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
seriously, i want to try to prove something, but you have to define your terms. for example, when you say something, do you mean i should be able to prove the existence of a member of a class called something, which might include the nalgene bottle on my desk, or prove that there is a thing in the universe that exists? and prove, what does that mean, do you mean demonstrate its existence regardless of the observer or do you mean illustrate the necessity of its existence from first principles or what? and exists, that's a whole other can of worms. so... ?
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
well the quandry doesn't assume one god, that's the thing, simply 'god'. presumably your choice is between believing in one god or believing in no god at all. and if you can name a mainstream belief system in which the gods are ambivalent to your believing in them, that would be an argument, but i don't think it does much to invalidate this idea.
ati- reason alone cannot tell you that there is or is not a god, it's not possible. and almost certainly, if you treat this as a game theory problem, the only reasonable choice is to believe in god.
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
right but the game theory is not determining factual philosophical truth, it's merely asserting the most logical course of action for a being who wishes for the best possible outcome to a situation. game theory isn't "wrong" for predicting it.
gregmills, i think you've hit on my main problem with pascal's wager as well. who says god gives a shit if you believe in him or not? and on top of that, are we supposed to really believe that god is so naive that he wouldn't see through a person "believing" just for the sake of salvation?
but that raises another question, of what it means to "be" a pious person.
let's say, for example, that i am at my core a totally evil and despicable person, with the ultimate intent of killing all "good" people. but i correctly recognize that the best way would be to get close to them first, so from my first willful action i perform only "good" acts, so as to confuse the "good" into thinking that i am good. my ultimate intent is nefarious, but if i am hit by a bus before i ever commit an evil deed, what's the difference? can we cross-apply this sort of reasoning to say if you act pious, that's basically good enough?
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
i think it's a really good idea, but we'd need to work on the logistics. perhaps we should get a few heads together who are interested in teaching to discuss how this might actually work? you can count me in for sure.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
medeski, martin, scofield & wood: out louder. it's acid jazz, sometimes lighter and sometimes very experimental, but consistently different. the former are light but good, and as for the latter, i honestly can't say i've ever heard anything like it, and that's why i love it.
Music - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
i have a difficult time with the fact that you keep asserting that momentum and mass are somehow very deeply involved with each other, which isn't really true... here are a couple ways of expressing momentum that do not ever explicitly involve mass:
momentum is a concept that, in classical physics, is easiest to understand as mv, but it exists beyond that...
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i keep a 1TB RAID-3 array on hand for just such a purpose.
Pirates - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
photons are particles with zero mass - and that is a real zero, not a value very close to zero, but zero. photons have energy according to the relativistic energy formula:
so, since their mass is zero,
. Why? I can't tell you that, and I'm not sure that anybody can. What we do know is that anything that moves at the speed of light must, by definition, have zero mass. However that does not imply zero energy, or zero momentum.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
so think of it this way. let's say you have a particle moving in the positive z direction (+z) with some momentum p=pz. as it crosses some point, lasers are turned on that shine light in both the + and - z directions, and each photon in the beam has some momentum p. if the collisions between the particle and the photons are completely inelastic, exchange of momentum will occur between the laser beams and the particle, with the majority of the interaction occuring between the particle and the "headwind" of photons in the beam. due to the doppler effect , the particle sees the beam that is headed towards it at a shorter wavelength, and therefore a higher frequency. since
a higher frequency corresponds to a higher energy(
). the same phenomenon shifts the apparent energy of the "tailwind" behind the particle in the opposite direction (
), so that now there is a higher energy in front of the particle and a lower energy behind it. unless the ion is moving very, very quickly though, this energy gradient
is small, so that the particle is now experiencing some force, directed opposite its motion, that tends to slow it down. but here's the catch. as it slows down, that energy gradient decreases, because the doppler shift begins to weaken. so as the particle begins to be accelerated in the other direction, the forces that tend to accelerate it weaken proportionately, so that what you end up with is a slower moving particle. if the particle ends up with some momentum in the other direction, this process repeats until the particle comes to rest at zero velocity, where the forces on all sides are equal.
it may be helpful also to think of this in terms of potential energy. the lasers create a potential energy well, where the minimum is a point where the potential energy is zero... and that is when all of the forces on the particle are balanced, which is precisely the center of the beams. an analogy would be a particle in a valley formed by two symmetric hills. if you push the particle off of the top of one of the hills, it will eventually settle in the position representing the lowest potential energy... the middle.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
actually, yes, you are completely right, photons do have momentum. that momentum is what is responsible for solar sails, among other things. and your soccer ball/hoses analogy is actually pretty apt. what you are missing here is the precision with which this is all done... it's not like these physicists walk into a room, put some lasers down, and start cooling off their beers. it is all done in a highly controlled environment, with precise ion and photon energies, and it is also done in a magnetic field to help confine the ions (the technical name for this is magneto-optical trapping). and it's not perfect either - typical MOT experiments do not confine the entire beam, they do lose some of it. however, it is becoming more and more effective. some teams have successfully trapped single ions.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
yep, 280pK... that's pretty damned cold. comparable to the coldest temperature in the universe.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
well, the uncertainty principle came along a little later, i think we should start with the photoelectric effect & blackbody radiation... probably the two ideas that really pushed quantum mechanics forward and brought it into the accepted realm. how should we discuss this?
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
as somebody who really loves quantum mechanics, i really didn't like what the bleep do we know. it focused way too much on the fringe (and what they are talking about is the fringiest of fringes) when many of the elements of quantum mechanics that are the most fascinating are right in the foundation of the field. my opinion, of course, but if you do see the movie, don't make the mistake of thinking that those are ideas that are widely pursued... with the exception of the "multiple realities" idea. that is a semi-bastardization of the feynmann path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, but is nonetheless not an unorthodox interpretation.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i am posting this because of an earlier post about trig identities and help working with them. euler's formula will totally simplify your life when it comes to trig. this is it:
and, if you want to solve for sin or cos, you get
stay tuned for a couple solutions to trig identities to show how they are actually used.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
god damn it, those are supposed to be 1/2's in front of the identities for sin(x) and cos(x). why isn't this real latex? jawad, i'm looking at you...
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
but it's easy to see why feynman would say that... look at all 5 of the fundamental mathematical constants in the universe, all related. pretty hot.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
definitely good stuff.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
ati-
sure, actually, i'd love to be involved in something like that. would it be like the atheist essay style, hosted on shuzak, or another collaborative effort? it would definitely take some work, but it would be a ton of fun... and it might play in to the ideas about having "classes" on shuzak.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
one kelvin? that's actually not terribly impressive... our cryo facilities here do 1.8K on a daily basis, and microkelvin temperatures have been achieved in various laboratories. hell, the record in 1993 was 280pK.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
Well maybe using laser cooling it is an achievement, but other cryogenic methods can cool enormous masses to very cold temperatures. We routinely cool several hundred pounds worth of metal to 2K in a few hours.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
ati-
i think it sounds pretty good to me. you could start with the basic postulates and move on up through subjects like quantum tunneling without a great deal of technical understanding. why don't we talk more about this and we'll come up with a plan... a subject like this will probably require a more advanced latex engine than the one that is implemented on shuzak.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
hey gringostar. here's a trick that you can always use if you totally blank. this is actually where trig identities come from (they are not totally arbitrary like it sometimes seems):
euler's formula:
using that fact and a little knowledge about how to work with exponentials, you can derive any trig identity you want, easy as pie.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
you two are straying into a discussion of laplace's demon. look him up if you're curious...
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
couldn't have said it better myself
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
ahh gotcha. that's where the good old gentoo-utils package comes in nicely. you can just do an 'efix world' or something to that effect, and it'll patch up all of the problems. also 'revdep-rebuild' is a nice tool... there are quite a few to help out with problems like that.
Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
ati i am all about what you just said dude. if you can't defend your position then it isn't a position worth having.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i agree in general with the sentiments expressed in this thread, and especially with the general motivation behind it... i myself have become slightly scare due to the lack of what i consider interesting subjects.
i do wish to add one thing:
if people are unhappy with the level of "geekiness", you ought to post something geeky! remember that this is a community, not a site that purports to host geeky material and doesn't... i mean i agree that the structure of the site could be altered to encourage more geeky stuff, but shouldn't the structure of the site augment the geekiness, rather than create it? is jawad solely responsible for bringing out the geek in all of us?
all i'm saying is don't be complacent and wait for jawad to do something that forces you to be a geek. post a topic or a question that you think is interesting. and you don't have to encourage people when they post off the subject... there is nothing wrong with reminding people that if they want to discuss stickers or whatever they are in the wrong thread.
p.s., i really like the classes idea. i would love to tap into the collective body of coding knowledge that is clearly around here.
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
alright here's a question:
why bother being a vegan?
Food - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i use gentoo, i have it installed on three different boxes that i use every day, and i love it.
the reason i switched from windows to linux in the first place was because of the way the windows operating system manages the computer... it does what it wants, when it wants, and doesn't particularly care what the user's input is. i find this little fact irritating precisely because it is NOT a flaw, but rather a design feature.
i use a source based distribution because it gives you complete control over every aspect of how your operating system functions. i set it up to do what i want it to do from start to finish, and it's a dream from there on out. no unpredictability, no programs that i don't need or want, and perfect compatibility with my hardware (since that's how i designed it).
in my opinion, the problem with distributions like ubuntu, red hat, and the like, which i lump together as binary distros, is the lack of optimization. they are designed to be blanket solutions, and that's how they function. for example, taking even a cursory look at a redhat startup sequence will tell you that it's not optimized... why does every redhat computer load raid drivers and utilities, regardless of if a RAID array is even present, let alone planned? at the end of the day, the kernels and initscripts for these distros tend to be bloated and imprecise.
that concludes my rant.
and mad ant, if emerge portage broke your system, something wasn't configured correctly.
Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 4 |
|
ati-
ok, i've been thinking about this for a few days. you raise an interesting and tough question... i think that the solution to this is a bit like that to maxwell's demon, which i will probably start a thread on as well.
here's what i'm thinking, which involves a series of probabilistically near impossible events. nonetheless, it is likely to happen at some point due solely to the enormous nature of the universe.
particle A is created at some point and meets immediately with its antiparticle A*. As we know, A+A* leads to an annihilation event with photons being created with an energy equivalent to that of the particles involved. let's also say, while we're at it, that only a single photon is released. that photon immediately strikes a detector, be it an eye or anything else, and is completely absorbed, so that there is no scattering. therefore, the energy of a particle that is virtual has been deposited in a real apparatus.
at first glance, i actually do not see any problem with this occuring. my assumption is that there is a thermodynamic argument along the lines of the second law that permits this to occur as long as the total entropy of the system increases.
the problem is that this is begging a question. let's say that i create an extremely intense beam of particles and channel it into a particular region of space. that beam should then interact in the above way with the vacuum, and produce a spontaneous and discrete radiation spectrum... and the total energy of the system should gradually increase. this is nonphysical and counterintuitive, which means something is wrong somewhere.
most pair production that i know of involves the borrowing of existing energy. for example, if a photon passes very close to the nucleus of an atom, the coulomb energy of the nucleus can be "borrowed" to create an electron-positron pair. in fact, if you examine data from facilities like GAMMASPHERE, you see distinct lines at 511keV from gamma rays that are created in pair production/annihilation events close to the nucleus.
after thinking it over, my conclusion is that this scenario is impossible. virtual particles can only be made real by the borrowing of existing energy. it is permissible for those virtual-made-real particles to then annihilate or otherwise convert the energy to another form, or even lose it, but it is nonsensical for those particles to deposit energy somewhere that it was not to begin with.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
ati-
i know i've said it before, but to reiterate, this is almost all (slightly) informed speculation on my part. if you extend what i was saying before about borrowing from existing energy sources, it is actually not possible for virtual particles to exist unless there is a source of energy for them to borrow their mass from. in the case of photoproduction, a photon moves close enough to an object, such as the nucleus of an atom, and "lends" its energy to a pair of particles - a positron and an electron. they then annihilate with each other, and the photon is reborn. aside from this being well accepted and observed, this is the only way that i can concieve of this scheme making physical sense. otherwise, as i noted above, you could get infinite energy out of a beam of particles.
note that there is absolutely nothing forbidding the particles created in the photoproduction event from interacting with the rest of the universe... since they have borrowed their mass from the photon, they are real so long as they can keep from annihilating with their environment.
come to think of it, perhaps 'virtual' particles are just a framework for understanding phenomenon such as photoproduction. it may be that the best way to understand particles coming into existence suddenly is to assume that there is some coupling constant between mass-energy and the vacuum.
there is another factor that is a bit confusing with all of this... quantum tunneling. electrons can simply disappear and reappear on the other side of a potential barrier. i'll have to think about why the reverse process cannot occur.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
ok, now that i've lured you into my devil's advocate trap, i'm going to force you to defend your argument. we will assume the following statements are true:
1) current commercial production of animal products is generally cruel and immoral.
2) the current system under which animal products are produced is governed and in fact created by market forces - that is to say that supply, demand, and profit are the reason that more ethical methods are not pursued.
3) current practices in raising livestock have rendered a great deal of land completely unusable except for the purpose of raising livestock.
4) many people simply will not submit to a diet that does not include some animal protein.
5) the market is driven by consumer forces.
so, we will take 1 as given because it is true and i don't think there will be arguments to the contrary. if 2 is true, then the fact is that the most profitable way to produce animal products is the current one; the demand for these products is high, and therefore supply must exeed it. add 4 to the equation, and you see that this is a trend that is unlikely to stop in the near future. people want meat, and they will have it. on top of that, 3 seems to suggest that perhaps the best use of the land, given its current condition, is to accept the production of livestock for food.
therefore, the moral thing, if animals are to be treated fairly, is to change the way in which they are raised & farmed. this brings me to 5 - that the market is consumer driven. if that is the case, then avoiding animal products altogether is actually ineffective except as a purely personal measure. the market does not react to forces that do not exist. instead, if we are to change the way that livestock is produced, we must coerce the market to provide a more equitable situation. my conclusion, if the above 5 statements are true, is that it is a morally superior position to purchase animal products that are produced in an ethical way, rather than not purchasing them at all.
"if you didn't vote, don't complain."
Food - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
not useless, just counterproductive. i guess i see it in the same vein as voting... if you want the marketplace to change, you have to cast your vote in the marketplace. i'm not saying that animals must suffer for our benefit, i'm saying that there are ways to have animal products that don't involve animal suffering.
so i'm interested, why do you think that avoiding animal products altogether is useful?
Food - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
well it means it's more unlikely in deep space, yes, but there is still a non-zero photon flux through most regions of space... CMB, if nothing else. i don't claim to have the answers on this one.
and in terms of the curvature of spacetime, even if there was a huge flux of virtual particles in deep space, remember that the energy balance must always be zero... so it wouldn't affect spacetime anyways.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
joe-
that is a cop out answer. i promise i'm not trying to antagonize you, and frankly i agree with your beliefs. i just want to know what's behind them, because i've given the matter some thought and what i've arrived at i already stated above. we share the same goal and disagree about the approach. i would love to be proven wrong...
wench-
you and i are in the same boat on this one i think. and i do think that halal and kosher are better methods of slaughter... yes, it is still slaughter, but it is at least with some respect for the animal.
Food - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i am a bonafide debate villain. i love to debate, and i do it all the time.
i think (for me at least) it's not so much about changing somebody's mind, although that can happen, as it is about provoking thought on both sides of an issue.
then again not everybody works that way, and sometimes you just come across as a total argumentative ass. you win some and you lose some.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
how would we put a physical value on it? doesn't that mean somebody has to buy something at some point?
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: |
|
ati-
to my knowledge there are only a few rather extreme cases in which the particles which borrow energy do interact with real matter. the key to understanding the vacuum energy is that the greater the energy of the virtual particle(s) being created, the smaller the amount of time they can exist:
and the only really good way for there to be any dramatic burst of energy is through particle-antiparticle annihilation. So you would need two enormously massive particles, or extremely highly energetic low mass particles, to annihilate and release gamma rays. this gives a pretty stringent set of constraints, since a quick calculation will tell you that a particle of energy 1MeV (read: a barely relativistic electron) can only exist for
seconds or so, and the energy that would be released, 2MeV, if this virtual electron could find a virtual positron to annihilate with within that timespan, would be a pittance compared to the bombardment that we recieve from sources all around us, all the time. the probability of a massive event such as what you are talking about, due to the enormous energy, is vanishingly small if not completely impossible via facts that I am not aware of (this is not my main field of study).
now if you take this story near exotic places, such as black holes, you get a different story. hawking proposed that if a particle/antiparticle pair were created near the event horizon of a black hole, one partner could be sucked in while the other escaped. this leaves a net energy imbalance, since the original 1MeV that has to be borrowed (511keV per particle) is returned to the vacuum by only half. hence, the evaporation of black holes.
so the answer to your question is that yes, it is entirely possible and in fact common for virtual matter to interact with real matter. the casimir effect is a good example, and so is the evaporation of black holes. but these are tiny effects, owing to quantum vacuum fluctuations, and large scale productions are highly unlikely.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
that should be a fraction, h over 4 pi. damned markup.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i won't mention the superiority of source based distributions in this regard, but i'm thinking about it.
Ubuntu Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
gringo, that is your personal impression of religion. and science has lied to us before, too, before we realize the error in the theory and correct it.
Life - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
ati-
that is a point that i'm not totally clear on either, but this is how i understand it - it is ok to violate conservation principles, as long as you don't do it for very long as according to the heisenberg principle. so if a virtual particle popped into the universe, ran into its antiparticle, and annihilated, that would be fine as long as the resulting photon then decayed into a particle pair, one of which disappeared. so it would be virtual particle + antiparticle in -> gamma ray -> antiparticle + virtual particle and then the virtual particle returns to being entirely virtual. maybe. like i said, that's just my guess.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
well, uh, ahem.
the casimir effect can be understood pretty well if you go straight to casimir's idea, which is really boiled down simply to properly assigning boundary conditions in electromagnetic problems.
standing electromagnetic waves must all satisfy the same boundary condition, that is that the electric field vanishes at the boundary. it must be zero. so as you decrease the size of any area enclosed by electromagnetic boundaries (such as metals), the number of permissible 'modes', or standing waves, in the structure decreases. since the total energy in the cavity is the sum of all of the energy contributions from individual modes, it doesn't take long (with the appropriate math) to figure out that there is less energy confined in the casimir cavity than outside. it's much like solving the helmholtz equation for any waveguide, really.
so because there are more permissible mode structures outside the cavity than in it, there is a differential which causes a force on the walls or plates that form the cavity. but this is not due to the energy itself, rather, it is a lot like having a pressure differential across a membrane. it will flex towards the side of lower pressure.
but the casimir effect is tiny tiny tiny, to the point where in any situation other than a cube 10 nanometers on a side, it can be completely neglected.
in my opinion, it's rather unlikely that the vacuum energy will ever be harnessed to produce anything more spectacular than a force on two tiny parallel plates. the whole thing is governed by the uncertainty principle, which puts an upper limit on how long particles of given energies can "borrow" their mass energy to become real particles. unfortunately for prospective harvesters, the higher the energy of the particle, the shorter it lasts. and "short" is not like an episode of a television show short, this is short on incredible timescales. think the planck time scale. that's 44 zeroes and then a 1.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
probably just a symptom of ubuntu's ipv6 "readiness" when the rest of the world isn't.
Ubuntu Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
hey tom,
basically what your hosts file does is give your linux box an idea of how to map network addresses without the nameserver. on my box, which is gentoo (but they are all similar), my files look like this:
/etc/hostname
127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost
x.x.x.x networked box 1
x.x.x.x networked box 2
and so on. the ::1 is an ipv6 thing. you don't need to have the name of your computer or localhost.localdomain in your hosts file, and in fact according to strict UNIX standards it shouldn't be there. instead, your hostname should be in /etc/hostname.
you should be fine editing it the same way that is shown on the blog. good luck...
Ubuntu Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.
Jokes - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
nadeem-
you're right in that the point of science is to be true to reality, but therein lies the dilemma. the reality that we are trying to define is clearly 'our' reality... the actual laws of nature, if they do indeed exist, are at best approximated by the laws and rules which we have managed to derive. as an example, the task of naming one 'law' of nature that conforms to our expectations in every limit is actually fairly difficult.
science, to me, seems to be every bit as much a cosmic cry for help as religion... it's simply done with greater precision.
Life - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
tofugorilla -
oh, goodness gracious, your last post needs a benevolent edit. in science, DATA is never, ever, ever discarded, unless the way in which it was taken is flawed (which makes the data meaningless). it is only our interpretation of said data that changes.
i think science and religion are almost identical. in my eyes, they both are just trying to explain what we see in terms that we can approach. the difference is the level of proof involved, with religion having only implicit proof and science having explicit proof.
Life - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
well i'm glad it was intelligible... i think the general idea of quantum computing is pretty simple, but the implications are hard to really get a hold of. as mentioned above, the whole "works without being turned on" thing is a little mind boggling, and i have yet to come across an adequate explanation of it.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
ati, you're almost right about this.
quantum mechanics takes place in a wonderful world called a hilbert space. it is named after david hilbert (i think), who was a mathematician back in the day that did a lot of work on vector spaces. hilbert spaces are infinite-dimensional vector spaces with some special properties that lend themselves readily to quantum mechanics.
why bring this up? because the easiest way to understand how a qubit (quantum bit) works is through the hilbert space. it turns out that the basis vectors in a hilbert space represent the set of solutions to the schrodinger equation, so any viable wavevector can be represented as a linear combination of the possible solutions to the schrodinger equation given a certain potential.
when you are talking about spin in the simplest case, for example a free electron, the possible states of the system are +1/2 or -1/2... or, if you like, -1 and 1, with a little vector algebra. the important thing to keep in mind here is that they are both valid solutions.
so, a classical bit in a classical computer can assume one of two values, either 0 or 1. it cannot be both, and it cannot be 1/2 of one and 1/2 of the other, these are nonsense in the framework of classical computation. this is the main difference between classical and quantum computing.
a qubit, by nature, exists in a superposition of states - a mixture of 0 and 1 simultaneously... so a given qubit may be in a state that is 30% 0 and 70% 1, or any other coefficients that add to 100%. at the end of the day, this means that qubits, working together, and in theory, can arrive at every possible solution to a problem without ever iterating. this is the same reason that it is so important to isolate the actual qubits - if you collapse the wavefunction of even one qubit that is involved in the computation, its value is fixed and is computationally worthless.
anyways, that's a nutshell... sorry if its convoluted or otherwise intractable, i have a tendency to ramble once the sun sets.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
well, just to play devil's advocate, why wouldn't god pay attention to beings that he created? if we take the bible as accurate, and assume that creation was ultimately aimed at creating human life, why would he look the other way, even considering our insignificance? i think you are talking about another kind of god... in fact, i think the god that you are talking about is precisely the kind of god who would create the conditions and then let things play out as they may. creationism lurks dangerously nearby...
What Is A Geek? - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
adblock plus
nuff said
Shuzak Current Affairs - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
i agree with gringostar for the most part, we are here due to an extraordinary set of circumstances that conspired to produce amino acids. on the other hand, like they say, if i wasn't here, i'd be somewhere else... i am a firm believer in the notion that life is highly precocious, and will develop according to the principles of self-organization wherever it is possible.
but to address "the meaning of life", i think i've heard it said best as "the meaning of life is to give life meaning". it sounds like it should be on an inspirational poster somewhere, but honestly i think it's right.
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
i think what he means, if i'm taking this right having filtered it through others posts, is that he disagrees or at least challenges the notion that our brains are ultimately simple dynamical systems.
so joseph, tell me if you agree or disagree with this statement:
if we are able to specify completely the state of every neuron in a human brain at one particular instant in time (call it t=0), we should be able to predict with absolute precision the "next"
state of that human brain at t=1. therefore, given t=1, we can predict t=2, and so on and so on. in other words, if i can determine EXACTLY what you are thinking about, and the state of every neuron in your brain, i should be able to tell you what your next thought will be.
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
haha... yes, call it the neural recursion formula. if its a linear dynamical system, it has one just like anything else, right?
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
Can you make the assumption that there is a God based on the wonders and complexity of the universe implying a Designer?
not in the same way that we can assume that there are intelligent beings, which is ultimately a probabilistic argument. you CAN make the assumption that there is a god, but not based on statistical evidence.
and just for the sake of record, could you define the concept of god that you are defending?
What Is A Geek? - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
I can't answer this. It's like asking me why God wants us to be good instead of evil.
and this is the essence of faith - blind belief without proof or evidence. this is precisely why we are challenging your viewpoint, because it lacks any evidentiary claims. it is entirely possible to make a cogent argument for the validity of religion and the existence of god, but you are not quite getting there.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
p0ss - i'll let you off the hook with your original post by saying that the rest of the states of matter are considered exotic, since they don't exist except for under certain conditions. which i think is a little funny, and anthrocentric, since on balance the conditions are earth are special and the conditions in space and near galaxies are typical. anyhow i'm going to read the article...
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
Rob-
I am no theist, but I would point out that there are philosophers who have spent plenty of time trying to prove, logically, that there is a higher intelligence. Descartes, for example, with his argument via perfection, which is simple but elegant: "No human is perfect. The very existence of a word with the implication of perfect means there must be a perfect being. Therefore, god exists." Stuff like that. Not that I buy it, but I'm just saying that logic can be applied to prove damn near anything.
Does the existence of a god logically follow from our observations about the Universe? No. Then again, our current physical explanation of it all leaves some steps wide open as well, so we can hardly claim that our "logic" has produced a more seamless explanation than theism or religion could provide. I personally feel that the jury is out on this one. There will never be proof, save the rapture, that there is a God, but there will also never be proof that there is not a God. You'll see me on the sidelines.
Anyways, as to the idea of why so many geeks are atheists... beats the hell out of me. but i would like to pose a question, which i asked earlier but wish to reiterate in a different context. it's really in the form of a hypothetical.
let's say that tomorrow, somebody posits a new religion that incorporates a God that does not exclude your worldview, incorporates all present observations about the nature of the universe, and is agreeable to you in every way. would you accept this religion as true, or would you reject it based on its theistic nature?
What Is A Geek? - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
i've gotten a few tests back scored above 100%, but my favorite had to be my AP physics final in high school, for which i set the curve at 106%... drunk.
Students - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
ati-
that is true, although other forms of condensates may exist in nature... for example, superconducting electron pairs are a type of fermionic condensate.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
god i cannot wait for kde4... have you seen screenshots of plasma yet? what flavor of linux do you use?
OSS - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i've definitely got a couple to add, especially for you linux users out there. amaroK is an incredible media player (and there are rumors of a windows version soon). k3b is indispensible for burning cd's, dvd's, images, etc etc. and i have to weigh in for my team... gentoo linux.
OSS - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 4 |
|
yeah... unless drugs like beta blockers are secretly tiny speakers, i think this one has a long way to go before it hits the textbooks.
Cognitive Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i've been thinking on this one a lot lately. the conclusion that i have come to is that everybody has exactly the same brain, and that we just use them differently. after all, is there any reason to think that the brain, being an organ, develops any differently than the rest? there is a basic code that writes the idea down, and nature takes it from there. now, there is the difference in the synapses, and i think that is really where the brass tacks begin. people who are curious and logically inclined stay that way, and those who aren't... well, don't.
but it doesn't make them stupid. it's just like jawad is saying. there are many different types of intelligence, and we have to learn to recognize that. i wouldn't take my buick to feynman, and i wouldn't take my computer to cousteau. does that make them stupid? not quite.
and if you're still in doubt, tell it to the autistics that have an IQ of 65, but can do mental math faster than you can ever even dream of on a good day.
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
who is to say that identical minds produce identical thoughts? perhaps there is an element of "Sensitive dependence on initial conditions"... or chaos, as we generally know it.
anyways, i wish to weigh in on this by producing a definition of "life" that i came up with when talking with a friend. life, according to this, can be loosely defined as a self-sustaining thermodynamically unfavorable state that is prone to self-replication. the key there is thermodynamically... think about it. if you come into equilibrium with your surroundings, you die. on the other hand, the glass of water that we are talking about is in thermodynamic equilibrium with its surroundings. anyways, my two cents.
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
uhhh... what?
Cognitive Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
when we are talking about atheism here, do we mean the complete absence and irrelevance of an overseeing intelligence? or simply the falsehood of the western concept of god? or what? i find that many people, who claim to be atheists, admit to being "spiritual". myself included. that aside, i think this is an interesting question. i've recently been pondering the idea of "when" a person becomes a christian, or any faith for that matter.
the christian bible, for example, lays down a set of moral tenets that people are expected to uphold, but as we have had illuminatingly proven to us time and again, those who espouse the moral code do not always practice it. so are they lying? do they say they believe it when they dont? probably not, my guess would be that they consider themselves religious, even though they do not believe in or subscribe to certain subsets of the predominant moral wisdom.
perhaps it is this that makes so many geeks "atheists"... pure, simple inconsistency. geeks are, for the most part, highly trained and skilled in the field of critical thinking. ask yourself this: if there were a religion that claimed certain things, and held certain views, and you agreed completely with all of the views, and were unable to even approach disputing any of the claims, would you believe in it? i think i would.
however, most of the world's religions stand in stark contrast to this. most of the religions that we are exposed to fail to practice what they preach... we have christians executing people and muslims declaring others unbelievers. these inconsistencies are what get me.
aside from that, i consider myself 'spiritual' because of the wonderful and beautiful complexity with which the universe presents itself. the order that the universe displays is almost creepy, and it fills me with awe every time i think about it. to me, that is enough.
What Is A Geek? - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
hmm, but what would the "unimportant" bits of the human voice be? subharmonics? noise? i wonder what parts of the voice the brain recognizes, and which parts it discards.
Musicians - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
joseph: doesn't the fact that every human can come to a moral conclusion given enough facts imply that morality is relative? if the situation must be assessed before a moral decision can be made, then there must be a relative moral value to the situation.
"Morality" - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i think that alphaville deserves to be on there.
Movies and Film - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
i'm from kansas
nuff said
Meteorologists Unite! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
well, i figure our brains are pretty much 'tuned' to the waveform that is the human voice. it has recently been discovered that the human voice can be recovered from signals with astronomically high noise levels pretty faithfully. to me, that indicates that there is truly a pattern that our voices follow, and it would make sense for our brains to listen to that more than anything else. like a white tailed deer... you have to be tuned into the signals to receive them.
Musicians - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
gringo-
perhaps you've actually inadvertently hinted at an absolute morality, or at least some sort of compass. in order to define an absolute morality, we must turn to something absolute. that's what i mean by the worst enemy argument - something is moral if it is moral no matter who does it, and i mean this in the cross-cultural sense. but then again, morality is a completely abstract term. perhaps instead we should talk of moral acts.
the categorical imperative is difficult because it leaves us with very few moral acts. after all, in order to obviate the requirement that it be moral to everybody, you have to ask everybody, right? i can't say "well, in my opinion, such and such african tribe would agree that this is moral, as does everybody else on the planet, therefore it is." rather, it has to be in agreement with everybody... and i think that's pretty hard to find.
regardless of its impracticality, it may be the closest we can come to an objective morality. after all, if you do not perform actions that offend anybody, who can argue that they are immoral?
"Morality" - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
how do you tell an introverted mathematician from an extroverted one?
the extroverted one is looking at your shoes while you're talking to them.
Jokes - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
my dream job is to work at ITER in france on developing the world's first break-even fusion reactor... crossing my fingers...
Work - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
i am an accelerator physicist in the states.
Work - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
well i have to agree with ati, counting systems/numbers are universal and cross-cultural. numbers just seem to be one of those things that organisms figure out, and advanced mathematics isn't far behind it. as soon as you are trying to figure out any nonlinear problem, you need calculus... i think he's not assuming discrete mathematics, but rather the existence of continuous variables of some kind. and if the principle of nonlocality is true, there's no reason to suspect anything else. as to this particle being some sort of signal... maybe. but let's remember the amount of energy involved... the most advanced terrestrial particle accelerator is capable of
eV. this is 8 orders of magnitude beyond that... which is a tremendous number regardless of the level of advancement of intelligence. rob, you're right too. life is a tenacious little bastard, and i think will likely develop given a source of energy and enough time. we should be prepared to encounter living things that are completely beyond our comprehension or expectations.
i think this one at the end of the day is a real mystery. while it's not possible to rule out distant events, they do a fairly convincing job of analyzing the relevant probabilities. the fact that strings are high in the running for possible explanations is pretty interesting to me, as well.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
so i thought some more about this, and maybe the only moral fact is that it is ethical to do what is right in a situation, and unethical to do what is wrong. as of the question of whose value system you are using... i haven't gotten that far yet.
"Morality" - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
Jake: what kind of theoretical physics are you interested in? please, join the community, post your thoughts/ideas/etc...
p0ss: a thread on dark matter would be interesting indeed, i highly suggest that you start one.
ati: that is a feeling that just never leaves.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i finished the paper last night, let me know when you're done with it and we can discuss further.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
arXiv is amazing, i love it. you can get on there and find a paper about any damn thing you want, or might be interested in, or might not. there's a huge number of great computer science and mathematics papers on there as well, ripe for learning new subjects. glad you like it!
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
see LN, i agree with you to some extent, but that's where my "value system" conundrum comes in... let's remember that all hitler ever wanted was a perfect world. in his eyes, what he was doing was absolutely moral. so on whose values do we base our morality? and if we say our own, which we are utterly prone to do, then who checks our morals? and maybe this is the purpose of the thread, to uncover the "absolute" morality against which all morals must be weighed...
"Morality" - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
here's an idea.
a thing is moral if it is still moral given that it is done by your worst enemy in the spirit of your behavior.
so is the holocaust moral? no, because hitler would say it was immoral if the jews did it to all nazis. is stealing a candy bar moral if you are starving? yes, because hitler gets hungry, too. i dunno, this is probably fundamentally flawed in some way.
"Morality" - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
from a physics point of view:
quantum computers are difficult to scale up because of the problem of decoherence. when the quantum computer is computing, it is said to be a coherent state, where each individual qubit is in a superposition of states. however, this superposition is completely destroyed by -any- external influence which forces the qubit to one state or another... that could be an external magnetic or electric field, for example, that tends to align the cubit along its lines of force. so although it is nice to scale up a quantum computer, it is in practice very very hard because of the shielding that is required from the external environment.
and rob, the security of quantum information exchange is guaranteed under a very limited set of circumstances. in particular, one sided two party quantum communication protocols are actually categorically INsecure. so there are some bugs to get worked out of the system, and the claim that QC will provide completely secure communications is... well, hard to say.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
ok, cappy, i agree, but that does nothing to answer the question of if an action is moral or not. part of the problem with morals is that people disagree. is it moral for the authorities to chop that hand off?
"Morality" - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
jake-
it is true, the constants of the universe are aligned in our favor. but in my opinion, this is a rather flawed view... rather, we are simply the logical product of the set of constants that the universe obeys. if they were different, that doesn't mean nothing would form at all (barring extreme values that prevent nucleus formation). other than that, i agree with your basic premise
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
alright i'm going to try to respond to all of these as best i can... definitely nice to get a response!
nadeem: i am 100% with you on that one, brother. although i totally support people broadening their horizons and being introduced to something like physics, a little part of me goes crazy every time i hear somebody say that, for instance, earth is going to stop rotating. i guess that's part of why i started this thread, to try to really consolidate people in such a way that there is a viable "physics" community within shuzak.
p0ss: haha, touche. although i got a fairly healthy number of people to join 'the physical world', i realized i don't really know any of them, what their story and relationship to physics is, etc etc. so i thought what the hell, let's try to dig these people up. and by all means, join up, share your weird ideas! we'll try to straighten out that computer scientist in you...
joe: that's excellent man, i wish i had finished my bs in math, but i got a bit of a late start. i try to stay on top these days by reading some math when i get a chance... do you have a favorite mathematical/physical research interest? what makes you interested in astrophysics? keep your eyes open in the physical world, i'll be posting an article later today that i think you'll find interesting.
ati: well, i work in the test lab, which is where the actual accelerator R&D gets done. so there are really several sets of experiments that go on here... some are done "across the fence", which is the accelerator itself. that's where the high energy/nuclear experiments get done. over here, we basically design, test, and redesign superconducting structures for accelerators. my project right now is working on a superconducting cavity that will be used to directly measure the surface resistance of superconducting samples by a calorimetric method. other ongoing efforts are the upgrade to the main accelerator (6GeV to 12GeV), investigating the properties of thin films superconductors, measuring the residual resistance ratio of superconductors, and we also design cavities of a variety of shapes for accelerators around the world.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
joe again: there is not currently an experiment running here to measure gravitational waves... ati is referring to a brief conversation we had earlier in which i was talking about the cavity i am working on. it is extremely sensitive, and originally it was designed to detect gravitational waves. technically, it still can, although we don't use it for that purpose.
hx10: berkeley does indeed rock. god bless them for their lectures on physics.
rob: start a quantum computing thread, i love the subject!
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
good question. could magnetic fields be to blame? if
then particles on the outside of the disk of the proper charge would be gradually moved in, where they would accelerate due to orbital dynamics...
but this would require exact parameters to produce a jet. i don't know, i'm just brainstorming
Astronomical - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
yeah,
eV. that is really goddamned fast. viczy, do you plan on reading the paper? joe, i bet it would be more intriguing if you read the paper...
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
well, positively and negatively charged particles would move in opposite directions under that model, so i don't think it would work. i just read an article that indicated viscosity might be responsible, but i thought that the interstellar medium was too dilute for viscous effects... is that something you've heard of?
Astronomical - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i consider myself a moral relativist, so my answer would have to be "no". things that are ethical in one situation may not be ethical in another. for example, if i see some terribly crazy man about to kill another person on the street, and i shoot him, that could be considered ethical. remove the other person, and it is wildly unethical. similarly, if i am starving to death, and i steal a granola bar from wal-mart to keep myself alive, the impact to wal-mart is arguably zero, and my behavior is therefore ethical. if, on the other hand, i am rich, it is again unethical.
"Morality" - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
gringostar, that counts in my book. read anything interesting lately? if so, you should consider posting it in the physical world community... discussing things is a great way to further understanding.
where are you from?
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
well i think it's a fine idea. creating communities should cost more, and so should creating threads. it's a bit like the wikipedia model where you have to be around for a bit before you can just start editing/posting... you have to prove your mettle first.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
does it charge karma or require it?
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
i remember one year when i was living in southern wisconsin, the auroras made it as far south as chicago. i almost drove off the road.
did you see these?
Astronomical - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
about games. there is a social game called 'diplomacy' that i am a huge fan of, although it may be difficult to implement on shuzak. you basically divide up the world among the players. each turn has the duration of say, a week, and in that time, each player submits his or her 'move' for the week. they can build armies, etc etc. anyways maybe not that game exactly, but some variant of it or another social game would be sweet. a great way to waste time.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
I agree with viczy that the effect from the changing magnetic field will likely be trivial... after all, this is a dynamical system changing physically to produce the field, and it will not behave discontinuously. the damaging voltages and currents that are characteristic of an electromagnetic pulse are generated by very rapidly changing strong magnetic fields. the keyword there is rapidly, as the induced emf in a circuit is given as the negative rate of change of the magnetic field in that area. the earth's magnetic field is so weak at the surface that really incredibly rapid changes would have to take place. if you figure that the strength of the field is about 30 microtesla, then the field would have to drop to zero in under 30 microseconds just to produce a voltage surge equivalent to 1V in an appropriate loop. that's awfully fast for a physical dynamo.
Advanced Tech - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
p0ss-
faraday did in fact say that the induction in the loop is dependent on the number of loops, but that is a linear term - two loops simply has twice the inductance. so although it is true that the emf equation has to be modified to include the coil correction, if instead the emf was 1V, it will be 2V or 4V or 10V, for 2, 4 or 10 coils. however, the dominant term here is the fluctuation frequency, not the number of coils. a slowly varying field will not cause emp, period.
the point is that for a slowly varying system, we are not likely to see fluctuations significant enough for the derivative term to cause problems. remember, the polar reversal is ALREADY happening.
Advanced Tech - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
dare i ask what the proposed mechanism for this slowdown/reversal of the earth's direction of rotation is? please keep in mind that the reversal of the direction of a massive spinning object is not a light undertaking. it involves a huge transfer of energy... the kinetic energy associated with a rotating inertial body is
So, to slow the earth down to a stop and then get it moving in the other direction at the same speed will require twice this energy, which as a quick calculation gives
Given that the energy released by the detonation of a 1 gigaton nuclear warhead is about
We are talking about an amount of energy equivalent to detonating 100 billion 1 gigaton nuclear warheads simultaneously. That is, as we say in the industry, nontrivial.
Not to mention the effects on the balance of the solar system. Angular momentum, after all, is conserved. If ours goes to zero and reverses, the moon (and the sun, to some extent) must compensate. This is bad news in general.
Note that I am not ruling it out as impossible, just saying... it's going to take quite a bit to pull something like this off.
Advanced Tech - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
ehhhh, i don't know if this is a feature that would be really useful at this point. i like the idea, definitely, but i think there are some other areas of shuzak that could use work before we get too fancy. i like the history idea a lot, if you had a listing of your posts and the karma that they were given, and perhaps a notifier on that page that a point of karma has been added to a post... that would be sweet. chat still needs work as well. anyways, that's my two cents.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
yeah, i agree that the system could have holes in terms of banning people. not holes that aren't fixable, but holes nonetheless. but what about the rest of it?
also perhaps you could have a system based on karma or the time you have been a member or something similar, a la wikipedia, that would determine your ability to vote or the weight of your vote. you can never completely obviate the risk of somebody abusing the system, but you can at least make it really difficult.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
viczy:
ever hear of loop quantum gravity? the premise is exactly what you are talking about, that spacetime is quantized. it is currently considered highly adversarial to string theory. look it up, i'm sure you'd be fascinated.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
yeah, my only suggestions at this point are timestamps and a who's on thing... cool though.
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i think nadeem is correct in his idea that the west owes its superiority largely to historical accident. we should also remember that america, arguably the most powerful country in the world, benefits greatly from a lack of shared borders with aggressive countries.
that is not to say that the less developed countries are inferior, or that we should neglect their position in the world as inevitable. the issue is truly capitalism... money, just like anything else, requires a gradient to move effectively. if everybody in the world were completely equal, economics would cease to exist. if you have everything you need, and your neighbor is no better off than you, why trade anything with him?
not to hint at conspiracy or malintent, but i think the powers that be would rather that their snowball keep getting larger.
but i digress.
poss, to discuss your excellent point regarding ethical inertia (why aren't you doing something right now, instead of typing)... i would say that the most important thing is to do the greatest possible good given your circumstances. in fact, i would argue that a properly motivated humanitarian will do just that, regardless of how he starts. whether that humanitarian begins by working in a soup kitchen, or by working on cheap water purification systems, he or she will rapidly achieve their greatest possible good by doing whatever they can to do better than they are now, assuming the proper motivation.
so to answer your question, a person who goes to africa and vaccinates children instead of brushing their teeth may, in the long run, be doing LESS in the name of humanity than they could be doing if they just went to work and developed say, water purification systems or cheap solar panels.
to sum up my argument: good is important, but greatest POSSIBLE good is imperative.
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i am not an official vegetarian or vegan. i eat meat only rarely, and i actually eat sparsely in general. this is a post-college health awakening...
Food - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i'm not sure i agree with the line of reasoning that the people who are responsible for the iraq war did it for unethical or untowards reasons. in fact, it is in my opinion precisely the opposite, although i completely disagree with their mentality.
i have no doubt in my mind that cheney and bush believed that going to war in iraq was a necessary step towards democratization in the region, as they will no doubt justify the coming war in iran.
i further have no doubt that they believe that democratization is a good thing for all parties involved.
now, granted, they are fuckers.
but i also think that people have a lot of criticism to throw around and not much to contribute in terms of actual ideas. the topic of this thread is the iraq war strategy. so far the status quo has been discussed. any ideas to change the way things are going? would you have done it differently or at all?
Military Strategies and War - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
let's say, for example, that there is a technology that is in development, or needs to be in development, that could potentially change the course of humanity for the better, or even steer humanity away from certain disaster, and you are equipped mentally to work on that technology and help realize it.
i submit that it is unethical to work on another problem, given your ability to work on one of social influence and import.
after all, what is the difference between that and, say, pushing somebody out of the way of oncoming traffic? if you have knowledge that NOT doing something will cause harm, and you nonetheless refuse to do that thing, isn't that unethical?
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
rathmaster:
obviously there is no randomness in a nonrandom phenomenon. that is a moot point. if i roll a loaded die, i cannot expect random results.
hmmm, entanglement as consciousness. doesn't that further require humans as agents of universal consciousness? after all, if you entangle two photons, they don't "unentangle" until you measure the state of one or the other, but rather exist in a superposition, which doesn't seem terribly useful to the universe.
having written that, i realized that bits existing in a superposition of states is precisely the foundation of quantum computation, which means this topic has come full circle.
on the other hand, another foundation of quantum computation is the low probability of decoherence - interference with the computational system causing the wavefunction of some entangled state to collapse.
i will have to think more about this. at the moment it seems that the decoherence criterion is not met by the universe. entangled pairs are likely to be created in regions where they are also likely to be destroyed, so it seems an unlikely candidate for quantum computation. hmm...
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 4 |
|
yeah i'm afraid you'll have to be more specific than that.
FreeBSD - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
yeah, it seems that the division by zero occurs for certain values of the coefficients. not so good. the best thing to do to solve cubics is just follow cordano's procedure... and believe me, you don't even want to see the quartic formula. and the quintic, luckily, doesn't exist. it has been proven that you cannot analytically get the roots.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
ryegye:
the spin analogy is incorrect for two reasons. first, and foremost, the magnetic field of the earth is not quantized! it is not the case that the vector points up, or down, or not at all, rather it is a continuous variable that can point in any direction. that being said, it is also not true that the earth's magnetic field simply "rotates" during a polar shift. it instead ceases to be a collective phenomenon that points in one direction, instead forming many many small localized magnetic domains that eventually reorganize (so far) pointing in the other direction. hence the fear that the field will simply vanish - what if they fail to reorganize?
i'm not sure of the logic that if the poles reverse, electronics on the surface will suffer some terrible fate. the strength of the magnetic field near the surface is quite low, and i don't believe that electronics will be affected much by its reversing direction.
we definitely have better things to worry about. yellowstone exploding anybody????
Advanced Tech - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
the magnetic field has to pass through zero, otherwise the field would be discontinuous and nonphysical. if you take the north pole, and say that the magnetic field strength varies from -1 to +1 over the course of a year, it must at some point have been zero.
Advanced Tech - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
all of the cogs that make up a machine are round. is the machine therefore round?
many of the cells in our bodies respond to chemical gradients by physically moving towards or away from them. are humans chemotaxic?
i am not disputing the notion that we are connected to the universe, i simply disagree with the assertion that the universe, being composed of a number of things with property "x", must also possess property "x".
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
circadian rhythms are a big asset in getting to sleep as well... nothing helps me more than a good sleep schedule. but when that fails (read: sunday nights) i try to imagine dreams, if that makes sense... if you lie there and try to convince yourself that you are not awake, but rather asleep and just dreaming that you are awake, sometimes you can get there just by the power of self-suggestion. maybe not for everybody, but it works well for me.
Insomniacs Unite - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
i think that one of the major impacts that a polar reversal would have would be major disruption of the food chain... imagine birds or other species that navigate via the earth's magnetic field migrating the wrong way, for example. or simply the fact that as the earth's magnetic field goes from positive to negative (or vice versa), the field must pass through zero... clearly bad news in terms of cosmic rays, solar radiation, etc. humans would likely not be terribly affected. in fact, i'm not sure that much of our technology would suffer too much either... the earth's magnetic field at the surface is pretty weak, and although radio based communications would probably be in trouble (ionosphere), most of our stuff is satellite based anyways.
Advanced Tech - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
seth, that formula will have problems with certain coefficients where you will end up dividing by zero... not so good. check out mathworld for an excellent treatment of this problem, and many others as well...
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CubicFormula.html
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
it sounds like a real threat to me. technology already far outpaces our level of understanding or culture. what happens when, instead of being 1 generation behind, all of a sudden you are 200 generations behind?
Advanced Tech - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
the "iraq war strategy" is a contradiction in terms. this is not strategic military planning or execution, it is grasping in the dark. i am an american, and frankly i am ashamed of the policy. what it lacks, and what it has always lacked, is any semblance of an attempt at cultural understanding. the idea that you can somehow just import western values into a society that is completely different on many levels is nothing short of ignorant. a policy that is geared towards the actual humanitarian aspects of the mission, as opposed to the political, might have a chance at working.
Military Strategies and War - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
gentoo will build everything from source, unless you tell it otherwise... it can work with .rpm and .deb files as well, should you so choose. they have also recently changed the way the gentoo base system is installed so that the system installation only takes an hour or so. after that, you have to install xwindows/kde/gnome/whatever you want, and that can take some time. i think my fastest livecd to graphical environment time with gentoo was on the order of 6 hours, and i've definitely had the process take longer, about 12 hours. but this is strictly compile time, and i'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that compiling kde from source can take a while. i always just start it before bed and come back to a working environment the next morning. the nice thing about the package management system is that it tracks the current version of everything you have installed (or not installed), and updating the entire system can be done with a single command. i also personally feel that the system speed benefits from having a personalized kernel and gcc is plenty compensation for the extra time it takes. but that's just my two cents.
Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
nadeem, i think you pegged it on that one, but i want to take it a step further...
if the universe is, in fact, "instantaneously thinking and feeling everything that every conscious entity is thinking and feeling", i would ask "why?" by this i am trying to address the fact that any being that is capable of thinking and feeling is, by definition, conscious, and that beings thought process, incorporating its thoughts and emotions, is ultimately a sort of mechanism by which it affects its own survival and well-being, be it mental or physical. so if the universe is conscious, and its consciousness is composed in its entirety of a huge number of sub-consciousnesses, all of which are virtually independent, then the universes consciousness must be an enormously noisy thing indeed, and almost certainly would not be useful in promoting the survival of any sentient being. take no more proof than a subset of, say, 10 people out of the human population, and if you were able to monitor their thoughts, collective action or common interest would almost certainly be the exception, not the rule.
of course, the words "in its entirety" are very important to the argument. if the universe is sentient above and beyond the sum consciousness of its inhabitants, making us the metaphorical mitochondria to the universe's mind, then all of a sudden perhaps it is possible to focus our collective derangement into some sort of coherent process. however, doing so instantly removes the significance of our own consciousness from that of the universe, as it implies, directly, that our process of consciousness is ancillary to that of the universe.
of course, then there is another possibility, that the universe's consciousness is so far beyond ours that it cannot be defined in terms that are familiar to our own. if that is the case, then why build a giant apple out of a whole lot of oranges? and can you still even call it consciousness?
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
scorcho - do you think it makes sense to draw a line of distinction between the two ways of thinking, so that you "believe" that there is a rational answer or one that requires faith?
Life - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
yes, but you still CANNOT assert, logically, that the whole has the same characteristics as the parts, no matter what, it is logically both incorrect and indefensible. you can ASK if the universe could be conscious, but you must have reasons beyond "we are, so it must be".
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
i'm a faithful believer in gentoo. the package management system is top notch, and the documentation is amazing, and that's basically good enough for me.
Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
a little of both i guess. i consider myself a spiritual person but i don't subscribe to any organized notion of religion. as to what god actually is or cares about... that much i haven't figured out yet.
Life - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
amule is pretty great. i do about 10GB a day on a good month.
Pirates - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
hey surfwizz - i'm not topologically educated just yet, so for the math you'll have to ask patrick. accelerators are more my area, so any questions about those can be pointed at me.
New IDEAS - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i haven't read much on quantum cosmology, but why can't an outside observer collapse the wavefunction of the universe?
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
hey chadrack, i actually just went on a 4 day fast (my first) not too long ago. i did to to cleanse my system, but also for the reason of just doing it to prove to myself that i could do it. the 3rd day was definitely really hard - i think that was when my body truly ran out of food to consume and started to look elsewhere. but it's not unattainable, and after you fight through the hungry phase you feel pretty damned good.
just remember, your body will go into a famine response due to the fasting, and it is very very important to eat only easy to digest foods like fruits and vegetables for the first couple days after you come off the fast. and remember to drink a TON of water while you're fasting... you need to clear the ketones and other toxins from your system. best of luck.
Philosophy - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 4 |
|
ran-
hmm... is it possible to build a computer to figure out a problem that humans are incapable of? it seems that the computer is only capable of knowing what we tell it, and so for it to figure out a problem it would have to know what is legal (so to speak) and what is not in terms of how to solve the problem... i know, for example, that there is a mathematical theorem that states that a computer cannot derive a theorem, but only say if it is correct given a set of rules. do you think this has implications for computers solving problems on their own?
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
Definitely taught myself linux.... actually i think that might be the only way to learn it! also, i teach myself a lot of math. self-taught knot theory, nonlinear dynamics, chaotic dynamics, higher dimensional linear algebra... i am a big fan of the power of the textbook.
Autodidacts - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 4 |
|
windows CE has been out for quite some time now actually... at least a few years. unfortunately it's all closed source, so if you want to actually work on it you'd have to get at microsoft itself. however, if you are interested in small OSes for embedded applications, check out Damn Small Linux (www.damnsmalllinux.com). it's 50MB in size and is a full-featured OS.
New IDEAS - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
nobody knows. one of the postulates is that it was exactly that same process of pair production that provoked the primordial universe into expansion... another is a theory that comes from the D-brane description of the universe(s) - two huge membranes came very close together, one that was of extremely high energy density and one close to zero. they touched, and a little energy spilled off of the high energy density brane onto the other, which was ours. that energy expanded thermodynamically, and a few billions of years later i am sitting here typing about it. but we have little more than theory to go on at this point.
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
the statement that "because the humans in the universe possess consciousness, so does the universe" commits the logical fallacy of composition - just because the parts of an entity possess a quality, it does not mean that the entity as a whole possesses that quality. it is also, i think, very anthropocentric to assume that consciousness has a definition that can extend to beings or entities that are not human.
ryegye: you are still not choosing an observer, which you have to do to make sense of the argument... the point is that you, outside the completely isolated box, cannot prove, without measuring, if the atom has decayed or not, or that the cat is dead or not. it does not have to do with the experience of the cat, or the state of the atom, but rather with your ability to measure it. this is a postulate of quantum mechanics that has been proven time and again... it is entirely possible to have a system that is not in any one state, it is in many, until it is measured.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
well when i say "what does physics owe", i don't mean physics itself. i don't expect bose einstein condensates to show up at my apartment on sundays to help clean the place up. what i mean is the physics community. in other words, does science, as an enterprise, have a duty to use its power (which is immense) for good. take particle physicists for example, who spend hundreds of millions of dollars on an experiment to prove or disprove the existence of a certain particle, or add credence to a theory. is that ethical, considering the good that that same money, or brainpower for that matter, could do elsewhere?
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
yeah photons definitely have zero rest mass, but the same laws hold for them that holds for anything else: a particle with zero rest mass has zero mass at any velocity or energy. that's not to say that photons don't have energy, obviously, and momentum. after all,
and a particle/antiparticle pair lives on borrowed time - they come into existence when there is enough energy at a certain spot for the pair to "borrow", and then return their mass to energy. this happens all the time in accelerator situations. if you accelerate a nucleus, stripped of its electrons, to very high energies and then bring it near another nucleus, the electric repulsion between them stores a whole lot of energy. one of the consequences is that you have a constant background of gamma rays with an energy that seems peculiar - 1022keV, until you remember that an electron weighs 511keV, and a a positron weighs 511keV, and these are annihilation events. so the particle/antiparticle pair is "borrowing" energy from the electric repulsion for just long enough to annihilate with each other into two photons!
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
i'll do my best to explain whatever you need elaborated on... what specific piece(s) are you interested in?
New IDEAS - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
see, this is quite the can of worms. what if we knew, conclusively, in 1944 that by january of 1945 hitler would have a hydrogen bomb. is it still morally indefensible to construct a weapon in those circumstances?
the physical world - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
this might be a good point to bring up that old physics battleship, schrodingers cat.
for those who are unfamiliar, schrodingers cat is a thought experiment that goes like this. say you have a cat in a box, and with that cat in the box, you place a single radioactive atom with a known halflife. you connect a geiger counter to a small vial of poison, and then close the box. the question is this: at any time t, is the cat dead or alive? the real guts of this problem is the probabilistic nature of the process, which means that there is only one way to know definitively: open the box. you CANNOT know, from first principles, if the atom has decayed or not, no matter how long has passed. even if an infinite amount of time passes, there is still a vanishingly small probability that the atom has persevered in its stubbornness, and has not decayed - so the cat is still alive.
so back to the coin. flip a coin, catch it in your hand, and without looking at it, what face is showing? again, you cannot know until you open your hand, because the process is probabilistic. in fact, nobody knows, not the universe, not your cousin steve, nobody. not until a measurement is performed by the act of looking at it.
if you want to take it a step further, as many who are inclined to quantum mechanical thinking would, try this: until you open your hand, the coin is neither heads nor tails. it exists in a superposition of both heads and tails until you force it to be one or the other by looking at it. this is what is called the collapse of the wavefunction.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
it is easy to see that gravity must be its own force... objects which are electrically neutral (and therefore not subject to electromagnetism) and separated by distances far too large to be subject to the strong and weak force (which typically only work on the scale of femtometers,
m, still exhibit gravitational interaction. therefore, gravity cannot simply be some frankenstein force - it must have its own domain.
as for unification... that's a tough question, whether it exists or not. intuition seems to say that yes, of course it exists. why should gravity be special, why wouldn't it unify with the other forces in the same way as the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces?
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
yep, i found this a couple days ago on digg, i'm living in virginia right now.
America - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
sounds good man, you know best...
Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
i agree with alex on this one - to specify an event exactly, you only need four pieces of information... hence 4 dimensions.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
schrodinger's cat isn't incorrect... what you're talking about is who you are designating as the observer. regardless of who observes it, the wavefunction will collapse - the cat cannot be dead to the universe but alive to me. but to defend the experiment - how does the universe measure through a closed box? the only way for the universe to "measure" the outcome is to interact with the experiment, and it cannot do that, since the box is isolated. and sure, the cat can measure, but has no way of communicating through the box and a language barrier what the result of the experiment is. therefore, you are still blind, regardless of who can see.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
|
correct me if i'm wrong:
you seem to be saying that time should warp in 3 dimensions, so that you have seven coordinates: x,y,z,t,tx,ty,tz. is that correct?
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 1 |
|
other mathematical functions are surprisingly physical as well... consider the case above of the harmonic oscillator, where the potential is given by
the force on the particle is given by
so that in the case (as is often) that c is one half,
Ok, so that's the force on an oscillator, and we know it bounces back and forth. But if you take a close look at the (purely) mathematical function
and then iterate it several times...
it oscillates as well, with no reference anywhere to potentials, particles, or anything physical whatsoever.
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: |
|
Mathematics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: |
|
to augment jawad's comment:
there are a number of hindrances, not the least of which is gravity. in theory, all forces are mediated by particles which are exchanged in interactions. the electromagnetic force, for example, is mediated by photons, so that when two charges interact, they exchange photons to do so. the strong and weak nuclear forces are mediated by Z and W bosons and gluons, and these are also exchanged by particles in the nucleus as they interact. gravity stands out, because to fit in, there ought to be a particle that massive bodies exchange in order to interact. however, no such particle has been experimentally observed, and given the weak nature of gravity, designing an experiment to do so is very difficult. the theory behind gravitons is not exactly water-tight either - adding gravitons to the "standard model" of particle physics breaks the model completely at high energies! as if that weren't enough, theory predicts that at very high energies, all of the forces should become indistinguishable, forming a sort of strelectroweak force. again, gravity doesn't play nice, and there is no way to incorporate it.
so the real issue at hand, as jawad points out, is that the force that is most familiar to us - gravity - is completely incommensurate with our description of the rest of the forces of which we are aware. this has given rise to a number of "quantum gravity" models, such as string or M theory, as well as quantum loop gravity.
Science - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
gentoo, on my home, laptop, work, and number crunching machines. i have never had a problem once i learned it, and it runs equally well on every machine i have tried. in terms of package and rc file management, for my money it's got to be portage.
Linux - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 0 |
|
i think one of the big problems with the criticisms of string theory is that the physics community seems to have lost its patience... daniel makes a good point that it seems to be an inaccessible science, and in many ways it is very tricky and tough, especially the mathematics. but we shouldn't forget that bose-einstein consensation was predicted back in the 1920's, and wasn't experimentally observed until 6 or 7 decades later... ideas often outpace technology, but that doesn't mean we should throw them out.
Quantum Mechanics - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 2 |
|
i work in an accelerator lab, so this topic is of interest to me.
first, a question: could you be more clear about how you propose to accelerate the particle without losing energy from the field? This seems to violate the conservation of energy.
next, are you familiar with the synchrotron? it is an accelerator that uses RF voltage to stay "in sync" with the motion of the accelerated particles through it. imagine a positive particle moving towards a negatively charged copper ring... of course it will be accelerated towards the center, but as soon as it passes through the center, it is again attracted, but in the opposite direction, so that it loses energy. the way to solve this is to simply switch the sign on the charge as soon as the accelerated particle moves through, so that it is pulled through and then pushed out the other side. by chaining a lot of these together, you achieve a "standing wave" EM pattern that can (and is used to) accelerate particles to extremely high energies - one teravolt at fermilab, for example. by making the accelerating structures superconducting, you can keep the currents flowing forever with very low power requirements.
New IDEAS - Posted By jared.nance - Karma received: 3 |
